April 26, 2008

Come November, it does not matter who “wins” the White House, the lot of the average American will be the same no matter if Obama, Clinton, or McCain sit in the White House. And that lot will be one of increasing misery as the late, great United States is converted into a slave labor gulag, little different than China.

McCain told the commoners of Youngstown, Ohio, as much yesterday. “Republican John McCain made a risky argument in a hard-hit Ohio steel town yesterday, telling residents that free trade can help solve their problems,” reports the Boston Globe. “That is a tough sell in communities that have hemorrhaged jobs as manufacturing moved overseas and cheap imports flooded the market. But McCain insisted that free trade is the solution and not the cause.”

See, the problem is the little people resist “free trade,” as in a free hand for multinational corporations to loot the third world and now the first world, soon to be a third world nation. “The biggest problem is not so much what’s happened with free trade, but our inability to adjust to a new world economy,” McCain said during a town hall-style meeting at Youngstown State University. “So we want people to be part of that revolution, and we’ve got to be part of that new economy, rather than try to cling to an old economy.”

In other words, adjust to increasing poverty and diminishment of opportunity. It is, after all, a “revolution,” never mind a greedy revolution of the bankers and multinat CEOs who are determined to “level the playing field” here in the United States. After all, as fed gangster Greenspan declared, the average American makes too much money. He and she will soon be on par with the average Chinese and Indian slave, toiling for a couple bucks a day, if that. McCain simply wants you to accept your fate. It’s part of the “New Economy” and you have no choice but to assimilate.

The presumptive GOP nominee, on a weeklong tour of “forgotten” places where people are struggling with poverty and job losses, made a stop at a shuttered steel fabricating plant and criticized Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for saying, when they campaigned in the Ohio primary last month, that they would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Hand it to McCain for his honesty. NAFTA and its bastard children are not going anywhere, regardless of what the liars Clinton and Obama say. Get used to ever increasing poverty. Get ready for food riots like they have in Haiti and Egypt. Get ready to be a peasant. Get ready for the New Feudalism.

For McCain and his globalist handlers, this is a “revolution,” albeit a revolution of misery. Get on the platform, the train is leaving.

John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say — with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.

How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close to the White House. He’s one election away from it. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

What if a private memory of years of collaboration in his prison camp gnaws at McCain, and bursts out in his paroxysms of uncontrollable fury, his rantings about “gooks” and his terrifying commitment to a hundred years of war in Iraq. What if “the hero” knows he’s a phony?Doug Valentine has written the definitive history of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He knows about the POW experience. His dad, an Army man, was captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp in the Philippines for forced labor. Many of his mates died. Doug wrote a marvelous book about it, The Hotel Tacloban.

Now Valentine has picked up the unexploded bomb lying on McCain’s campaign trail this year. As he points out, he’s not the first. Rumors and charges have long swirled around McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. Fellow prisoners have given the lie to McCain’s claims. But Valentine has assembled the dossier. It’s devastating. We’re running it in our current CounterPunch newsletter and we strongly urge you to subscribe.

Some excerpts from Valentine’s indictment.

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”

“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital …

“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”

“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”

“…McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

“This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. . .”

Sen. John McCain says that if he’s elected president, he wants to create a worldwide "League of Democracies" to "revive democratic solidarity" and bypass gridlock at the United Nations."The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom. It could act where the U.N. fails to act," such as in Darfur, McCain says in advance excerpts of a speech he’s making Tuesday to the Hoover Institution.According to the excerpts, provided by his campaign, McCain envisions the new organization taking on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and "the crisis in our environment." He says it could also put pressure on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe "with or without Moscow’s and Beijing’s approval."Sounds like Russia and China might not be invited to join. Asked about that, McCain spokesman Danny Diaz declined to elaborate.McCain says he would call a summit of world democracies in his first year to explore the practical steps needed to realize his vision.Update at 8:30 a.m. ET, May 1: There’s an Associated Press story on McCain’s proposal here.